Posts Tagged ‘failure

It was 2003. My sister-in-law was visiting us. It was a weekend, and her, my wife, and our niece were going to go up the coast to a fish shack just over the Ventura County line. They asked if I wanted to join them. I said no.

The fly-by-night telecommunications company for which I worked had just closed its doors, but I had quickly found a job at a similar company. I started that following Monday. And all I could see was a hopeless, endless succession of dead-end jobs, one following the other, none leading to anything, no hope of doing anything better, anything more meaningful. I was trapped. I was in the grip of my depression.

Depression can be triggered by anything—or it can be triggered by nothing. It can have warning signs; or it can come upon you like Judgment Day, as a thief in the night. It robs you of you, turning you into someone other than who you were, altering you irrevocably. You are suddenly or not so suddenly this person you weren’t before, a distorted image of the person loved and cherished by others, an image of yourself dark, twisted, sent into the world too soon.

My depressive episodes, stretching back to the late Nineties, have usually been triggered by the combination of pointless work, or lack of work, and the curious malady of my stutter which made me despair of ever being able to do anything other than what I was doing. But triggers don’t always happen. As Robin Williams shows, people who have it all can feel as if they have nothing. Fame, glory, money: they don’t matter. When depression strikes, it doesn’t discriminate. It will take the high and the low, the rich and the poor. It’s very democratic in that way.

holding the entire government hostage while demanding the de facto repeal of a president’s signature legislation and not even bothering to negotiate is by any reasonable standard an extreme political act. It is an attempt to make an end run around the normal legislative process. There is no historical precedent for it. The last shutdowns, in 1995 and 1996, were not the product of unilateral demands to scrap existing law; they took place during a period of give-and-take budget negotiations.

But the political media’s aversion to doing anything that might be seen as taking sides — combined with its obsession with process — led them to actively obscure the truth in their coverage of the votes. If you did not already know what this was all about, reading the news would not help you understand. What makes all this more than a journalistic failure is that the press plays a crucial role in our democracy. We count on the press to help create an informed electorate. And perhaps even more important, we rely on the press to hold the powerful accountable.

That requires calling out political leaders when they transgress or fail to meet commonly agreed-upon standards: when they are corrupt, when they deceive, when they break the rules and refuse to govern. Such exposure is the first consequence. When the transgressions are sufficiently grave, what follows should be continued scrutiny, marginalization, contempt and ridicule. In the current political climate, journalistic false equivalence leads to an insufficiently informed electorate, because the public is not getting an accurate picture of what is going on.

WTHR: …. Chelsea Wheeler takes nine different medications every day. Pointing to two bottles, she said, “For these alone, it would easily be $3,000 a month.” … she lives with chronic kidney disease …. “When I got sick, I was 13 and it was kidney failure.”

While Chelsea has a good job, because she’s a contract employee she’s not eligible for insurance through the company. With the new law she can continue on her parents’ plan until she turns 26. It pays for all her meds, including those very expensive anti-rejection drugs.

…. “My entire life is based on getting medical care and without the Affordable Health Care Act I would not be able to do it,” she said. “I’d be drowning in debt trying to pay by myself ….. it’s a lifesaver.”

Newsonline: ….Mitt Romney is promoting his private-sector business experience to show he could do better than U.S. President Obama in creating jobs. But opponents will find fault in his record as a corporate raider in the 1980s and as Massachusetts governor when his performance on employment was mixed at best.

Romney stressed his experience as head of private equity firm Bain Capital … He made a fortune wheeling and dealing in companies, some of which endured big job cuts as part of restructuring. Some ultimately went bankrupt.

“He was a corporate raider who often made companies profitable, not by helping them perform better – but by simply laying off employees and killing jobs,” said Ray Buckley, Democratic Party chairman of New Hampshire.

Bain Capital, which Romney headed for more than a decade, specialized in leveraged buyouts: buying companies with money borrowed against their assets, grooming them to be sold off, and in the interim collecting huge fees.

Later, as Massachusetts governor from Jan. 2003 to Jan. 2007, Romney presided over one of the puniest rates of employment growth among the 50 U.S. states, at a time the nation’s economy was booming. Labor Department figures showed Massachusetts ranked 47th in the rate of jobs growth in those four years.

USA Today: The three-year-old free trade agreement with South Korea finally may be ready for congressional passage.

The Obama administration said today that their negotiators reached a deal with their South Korean counterparts on auto imports, exports and tariffs, the major stumbling block that had prevented the president from signing a revised treaty during a visit to Seoul last month.

Under the agreement, South Korea would cut its 8% tariff on U.S. automobiles in half and eliminate it in five years. The United States would keep its 2.5% tariff on South Korean autos during that five-year period. Automakers would get flexibility on meeting South Korean environmental standards.

Without the deal, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had estimated that 345,000 American workers could lose their jobs.

U.S. automakers exported less than 6,000 cars to South Korea in 2009 while South Korea has used its historically closed market to finance an aggressive push into the U.S. market, exporting 476,000 cars to the U.S. in 2009. The imbalance is so severe that automotive trade accounts for a full three-quarters of the $10.6 billion U.S. trade deficit with South Korea.

Business groups immediately hailed the breakthrough in negotiations, which came after four days of nearly round-the-clock negotiations in Washington.

(Hey, the Leftbaggers and Teabaggers have united yet again! They both oppose the deal, largely because they’re terrified it’ll be a success)

Three weeks ago….. AP: The President struck out in his attempt to close a new free-trade pact with Seoul …. It was an embarrassing setback for a president who stressed that the top objective of this trip was to cement agreements that would help create jobs at home…

…Obama said he needs “extra time” to reach agreement with longtime ally South Korea on a new free-trade agreement. He said he “wasn’t interested in making an announcement” just to send a signal of success and said he thinks any such pact can — and must — can be a “win-win” deal for the United States.

President Obama hailed the agreement as he was returning on Air Force One from a surprise trip to Afghanistan:

I am very pleased that the United States and South Korea have reached agreement on a landmark trade deal that is expected to increase annual exports of American goods by up to $11 billion and support at least 70,000 American jobs. Last month in Seoul, I directed our negotiators to achieve the best deal for American workers and companies, and this agreement meets that test.

American manufacturers of cars and trucks will gain more access to the Korean market and a level playing field to take advantage of that access. We are strengthening our ability to create and defend manufacturing jobs in the United States; increasing exports of agricultural products for American farmers and ranchers; and opening Korea’s services market to American companies. High standards for the protection of worker’s rights and the environment make this a model for future trade agreements, which must be both free and fair.

Today’s agreement is an integral part of my administration’s efforts to open foreign markets to U.S. goods and services, create jobs for American workers, farmers and businesses, and achieve our goal of doubling of U.S. exports over five years. It deepens the strong alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea and reinforces American leadership in the Asia Pacific. I look forward to working with Congress and leaders in both parties to get this done and to ensure that America competes aggressively for the jobs and markets of the 21st century.

President Barack Obama greets South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak during their bilateral meeting at the G20 Summit in Toronto, Canada, Saturday, June 26, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)